Lisa Zaslow is a guest blogger and the views expressed herein are her own and do not necessarily represent the views of Shared Interest Society.

Lisa is a passionate fair trade and microfinance activist currently living in North Carolina, USA. She is the founder of Blue People Fair Trade Ltd., an online store that specializes in fair trade and environmentally friendly accessories from all over the world. If you would like to be a guest blogger, please contact us with your interest.

As a schoolboy, Khader Khair worked in his uncle’s workshop on week-ends and during holidays learning how to carve olive wood. In the late 1980s, after Khader was forced to quit medical school during the first intifada, he started his own workshop. Since then, he has worked with his brother, Michael, and seven employees making beautiful olive wood jewelry. Today, Khader’s workshop is able to employ nine other families.

Khader’s workshop is part of the Holy Land Handicraft Cooperative Society, which was founded in 1981 by olive wood and mother-of-pearl artisans as a result of the deteriorating Palestinian handicrafts industry. The 36 member workshops of the cooperative and the additional 50 non-member workshops who work with the cooperative are located in the cities of Beit Sahour, Beit Jala and Bethlehem. The Holy Land Handicraft Cooperative Society is the only co-op in the occupied West Bank and impacts roughly 900 individual lives from their activities. All of the workshops embrace the principles of fair trade, including using sustainable materials, gender equity, disability rights and fair wages.

The tradition of olive wood and mother-of-pearl carving has deep roots in the Bethlehem region. For many thousands of years, Christians, Muslims and Jews traveled to the Holy Land because of the region’s religious significance. Pilgrims wanted to take home a locally made icon to memorialize their journey. For generations, artisans have made religious carvings for these pilgrims who are visiting holy sites in the West Bank and Israel and the region is dotted with small family workshops. The Holy Land Handicraft Cooperative thrived with pilgrimage tourism to Bethlehem, however, everything changed with the Palestinian Uprising and the tightening of Israeli occupation policies. Moving around the area became very difficult as the region was encircled with an intricate system of military check points, army bases, Jewish settlements and, more recently, the Separation Wall. The impact has had a devastating effect on the local economy. Tourism has come to a full halt and many artisans have lost family members to violence. Also, the area is losing craftsmen who are forced to leave behind their traditional trade and their families to escape the difficult conditions in their homeland.

The Holy Land Handicraft Cooperative is adopting a strategy to open the international market as a means to counter the damaging decline to the local handicraft industry. They aim to alleviate poverty, increase employment and strengthen the local community while preserving the centuries old craft and design traditions of the region for future generations. They also seek to provide leadership in the fair trade movement through their membership in the World Fair Trade Organization and by sharing their experiences with other farmers and artisans to create awareness about fair trade in Palestine, aid Palestinian artisans and producers in marketing through international fair trade channels and work with other Arab Fair Trade Organizations to establish a working network that will, hopefully, lead to an Arab Fair Trade Region.

The Holy Land Handicraft Cooperative’s offerings include olive wood works of art, mother-of-pearl items, vibrantly painted ceramics, hand blown glass and graceful embroidered cloth. It is through their website that they want people to discover their indigenous traditions of craftsmanship and help their members by ordering their products. Go to www.holyland-handicraft.org to find out more.

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